Painter Represents Indigenous People Around the World

- I'm really interested in how to express and represent our indigenous and ancestral heritage in a foreign land.

Especially in this nation and this time where there are people out there that want to erase our existence, disappear our stories.

My name is Cece Carpio and I paint everyday people fighting for more dignified existence.

We're not like this fossil, historical people.

We are indigenous and we are here.

I was born and raised in the Philippines.

In the small barangay which is like a barrio, village.

My mother left me with my great grandmother when I was three months old to pursue, you know, that American dream.

My great grandma was from the Igorot community in the mountains in Luzon.

I only have a couple pictures of my great grandmother but her posture, her face is very much vivid in my memory.

She was amazing.

A midwife, an herbalist, this fierce matriarch, and I give credit to her for me wanting to draw.

She was illiterate.

So I would go back from school and we'd draw things out.

It became a means of communication for us.

Adapting to the American way, I had a really hard time.

For a while, I just stopped talking.

The community and the tribe in which my family comes from it's not here, so it's like, how do we then build community?

For me, in joining Trust Your Struggle, I couldn't define it then but this was my way to survive.

We represent different communities working in fighting for social justice.

I've come from a particular culture, it's never about "I", it's about "we".

You know, and that's how you move in the world.

I think as I got older and continuing on with this practice, there is a certain level of responsibility to be accountable to the folks that I'm representing.

It's like, "Man, I gotta do this right."

One of our honorary members of TYS is in the Philippines doing work in Mindanao.

I touched down and he was like, "Do you want to do a mural?"

It was an amazing, beautiful gathering at this evacuation camp called Haran in the middle of the city.

They've been rebuilding their homes the best way they know how and rebuilding the schools.

It took a while to kind of break in.

They speak a whole different language: Manobo.

But I was able to show them a little bit more of who I am and the work that I do.

It was very clear what they wanted to say, to end martial law, to have justice against militarization that's been happening, that had forced them out of their own homes.

So the imagery came really quick.

I think this skill that I've been cultivating is partially a means to document.

And I think the trick is like, how do I tell the complexities of those stories in this two-dimensional medium?

The struggles of my people back home and our reasons for migrating are connected.

This is our story, and my story.

If we're not telling them, someone else will and who knows what they're gonna tell?